Perhaps the best-known member of the 'fifth generation' of young directors to graduate from the Beijing Film Academy in 1982, Chen Kaige seems likely to become a challenging, innovative filmmaker of international renown
Though working in a country noted for its aesthetic, economic and ideological conservatism, and in a film industry riven with dissent, he has so far managed to make deeply personal films of a wide moral and political relevance
Set in 1939 in the topographically dramatic, culturally backward province of Shaanxi, Kaige's film debut "Yellow Earth" charts the brief encounter between a Communist soldier collecting folk songs and a family of villagers trapped by poverty and age-old feudal traditions
What distinguishes Chen's film, besides its oblique, metaphorical plot and Zhang Yimou's stunning, largely static landscape photography, is its acknowledgment of the gulf between peasants and outsider, of the difficulty, even impossibility, of enforcing political and social change Thus both aesthetically (in terms of its poetry and ambiguity) and ideologically, Chen was also acknowledging a deep division of opinion between 'official' history, as propagated by older Chinese filmmakers, and his own less idealized account of culture-clash
Set in 1939 in the topographically dramatic, culturally backward province of Shaanxi, Kaige's film debut "Yellow Earth" charts the brief encounter between a Communist soldier collecting folk songs and a family of villagers trapped by poverty and age-old feudal traditions
What distinguishes Chen's film, besides its oblique, metaphorical plot and Zhang Yimou's stunning, largely static landscape photography, is its acknowledgment of the gulf between peasants and outsider, of the difficulty, even impossibility, of enforcing political and social change Thus both aesthetically (in terms of its poetry and ambiguity) and ideologically, Chen was also acknowledging a deep division of opinion between 'official' history, as propagated by older Chinese filmmakers, and his own less idealized account of culture-clash